Asheville Under Surveillance

Buncombe County

4 min read

Asheville’s RTIC plugs into a county system with its own accountability story.

Timeline

  • Late 2021: Schools plug in first. Buncombe County Schools becomes the first WNC district on Fusus via a memorandum of understanding with the Sheriff’s Office: roughly 1,500 cameras across 43+ schools, with no public school-board vote on record. Watching the Poor
  • June 2022: The RTIC pitched as “a revenue opportunity.” The Sheriff’s Office presents the Real-Time Intelligence Center to county commissioners as an enterprise fund “without any cost to the tax payers” (the presentation PDF); Jasmine Beach-Ferrara and then-Chair Brownie Newman push back, the last commissioners ever to do so on the record. Timeline
  • July 2022: Commission approves $130,000 for the RTIC facility (Citizen Times via Yahoo · WLOS).
  • 2022: Black Mountain approves 5 Flock cameras, the county’s one municipal deployment with published results. Getting Flock Out
  • 2023: Sheriff signs a 5-year, ~$2.4–2.5M Axon contract. Whether it ever received its own commission vote is unestablished; the enterprise fund’s financials have never been reported anywhere (Citizen Times via Yahoo · WLOS). What Axon Contracts Do

How the sheriff pitched it: “a revenue opportunity”

That’s how the Sheriff’s Office pitched the Real-Time Intelligence Center to county commissioners in its own June 2022 presentation deck (the PDF): an enterprise fund: businesses paying $60/camera/year to join, partner organizations giving deputies camera access, surveillance as a self-funding product line. Two commissioners pushed back at the time: Jasmine Beach-Ferrara raised “constitutional issues… regarding public resources being used essentially for surveillance,” and then-Chair Brownie Newman said the sheriff had described it to him as a schools program. Both are gone from the board; no commissioner since has questioned it on the record. The commission approved $130,000 for the RTIC facility (July 2022) and the Sheriff signed a 5-year, ~$2.4–2.5M Axon contract (2023); whether that contract ever received its own commission vote is unestablished; the enterprise fund’s financials have never been reported anywhere. (Citizen Times via Yahoo · WLOS)

Current commissioner Drew Ball, now running for Asheville City Council, sits on the body that funds all of it.

The 1,500 school cameras

Buncombe County Schools became the first WNC district on Fusus in late 2021, via a memorandum of understanding with the Sheriff’s Office. Roughly 1,500 cameras across 43+ schools feed the network; the district says it controls when deputies get access. What I cannot find: any public school-board vote on the MOU, the MOU’s text, any parent-notification record, or any board policy governing it, and no board agenda has revisited camera access since national reporting showed ICE tapping school camera networks elsewhere. (Sheriff Miller has publicly barred ICE from schools without a court order, a personal commitment, not a policy that survives him; he’s on the November ballot, and so are three school-board seats.) These are the region’s premier records-request targets.

The towns

Black Mountain approved 5 Flock cameras in 2022 (the one municipal deployment with published results); Biltmore Forest quietly built out 13 cameras: the highest per-capita ALPR density in the county, documented only in town minutes, with zero press coverage ever; Woodfin, Weaverville, and Montreat show no camera programs (unconfirmed negatives).

Video for the pipeline: county commissioners and school board are on YouTube (the school board is even machine-transcribed by SeeGov); Biltmore Forest publishes no video at all.

Related: WNC and NC · Quentin Miller · Follow the Money · Documents

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